On an ordinary day in March, I opened a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs and felt my stomach drop.
It stated that my 14-year-old daughter had been reported deceased by the Social Security Administration (SSA). The date of death? March 16. Just two weeks earlier.
Except—she’s very much alive, sitting next to me. Healthy. In school. Laughing with friends. Completely unaware that, on paper, she no longer exists.
According to the letter, the VA was notified by the SSA because my daughter is eligible for education benefits through the VA. But we later learned that this “death notification” likely stemmed from a massive mishandling of data after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) —used an automated system to scrub ineligible or fraudulent profiles from the SSA database—was granted access to the Social Security database on March 14.
Coincidence? I think not.
Two days later, DOGE—had flagged my living, breathing child as deceased. This wasn’t just a simple mistake. It’s part of a deeper issue: a government agency operating with little oversight and even less transparency, making sweeping decisions that can have devastating consequences for innocent families.
I immediately called the VA. Fortunately, their representative was empathetic and was able to correct the record on their end. But when I tried to contact the SSA at 4:00 p.m. that same day, I was on hold for three hours—only to be disconnected when they closed at 7:00 p.m.
The next day, I finally got through to a representative. She told me not to worry—my daughter didn’t receive SSA benefits, so there was “no issue.” I had to press her to even check if the system showed her as deceased.
Eventually, she said the record was clean, meaning there was no record of death in their system. But she couldn’t tell me why the SSA had told the VA otherwise.
I wasn’t satisfied. So I called the local SSA office directly. That gentleman was far more helpful. He pulled up the record and confirmed that my daughter was not marked as deceased. But again—no explanation for why the VA had been notified.
This begs the question: who else did the SSA notify before they corrected the error? Did they alert the DMV? Her health insurer? The State Department Passport Office? The IRS? Will she be flagged as “deceased” when she tries to get a driver’s license, apply for college, open a bank account, or get her first job?
We have no way of knowing. If it weren’t for the VA letter, we’d still be in the dark.
DOGE was intended to prevent waste and fraud and I support the effort to save money and reduce debt — but its implementation appears to have been reckless. Instead of targeted improvements based on data, DOGE took a sledgehammer to the system, and my daughter was collateral damage.
And she’s likely not the only one.
While many government computer systems are outdated and often inefficient, they are time-tested and, more importantly, reliable. There’s no question they need modernization—but you can’t just tear them down and plug in something new without a thoughtful plan. The federal government isn’t a tech startup. It’s a massive, complex institution. Change is necessary, but it must be deliberate, measured, and tested—because the cost of getting it wrong isn’t measured in savings. It’s measured in people’s lives being upended.
There needs to be accountability for how DOGE rolled out this program. Because while automation may be efficient, it should never come at the cost of erasing a child from existence.
My daughter was DOGE’d. And it may haunt her for the rest of her life.
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